See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Sri Lanka.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Fountains of Paradise | Arthur C. Clarke | 31,256 | 3,686 |
| Anil’s Ghost | Michael Ondaatje | 18,593 | 4,118 |
| The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | Shehan Karunatilaka | 54,665 | 1,257 |
| Wave | Sonali Deraniyagala | 22,405 | 939 |
| Running in the Family | Michael Ondaatje | 9,699 | 1,781 |
| The Tea Planter’s Wife | Dinah Jefferies | 21,637 | 608 |
| You’re Invited | Amanda Jayatissa | 24,448 | 457 |
| Funny Boy | Shyam Selvadurai | 8,648 | 887 |
You may quibble that The Fountains of Paradise is mostly set on a fictional island called Taprobane; but Taprobane is in almost exactly the same place as Sri Lanka in our world, and it’s pretty clear where the writer had in mind when he was writing the book. Also I love it.
It’s surprising for the top book on my metric to be only in second place on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. Indeed there is an unusual divide between the two systems here: Michael Ondaatje is relatively way more popular than usual on LT, while the women writers on the list are relatively way more popular than usual on GR.
I must say that the book I most want to read off this list is probably Wave, which sounds interesting but tough, as Huck Finn said about Pilgrim’s Progress. I am not completely sure if it passes my 50% test, but it seems more likely than not.
I disqualified only two books this time (see also China, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Cameroon and Australia). They were both by Michael Ondaatje, who attracts “sri lanka” tags for obvious reasons. One was The English Patient, which actually outranked everything else by miles, but has no internal reference to Sri Lanka at all, and the other was The Cat’s Table, which would otherwise have been just below Anil’s Ghost and just above The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
Coming next: Taiwan, Malawi, Zambia and Chad.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia